After reading the Bible and observing Church activities for more than 20 years, Sarom de-cided to start his catechumenate
Little did Francios Sarum Koy know that becoming an art teacher for children and youths at a Catholic church 20 years ago would lead him to join the body of Christ on Easter Sunday this year.
The 67-year-old Cambodian recalls his inner journey of seeking the light of God through his artwork began in 2002 at the St. Mary of the Smile Church in Chamkar Teang, a village in southern Takeo province, about 80 kilometers from capital Phnom Penh.
Sarum, who specialized in classical art, was invited to teach art at the church on Saturdays and Sundays. This led to him working as a part time staff at the Catholic Art office of Phnom Penh Vicariate in Takeo pro-vince.
Although not a Catholic, du-ring these years Sarum authored many Catholic stories into drama and dance performances during feasts and festivals, especially local Christmas celebrations.
“It was difficult when I first started writing Catholic stories, because I come from a Hindu-Buddhist background,” he says.
But Sarum, said, the most important thing during this period was that be began reading the Khmer Catholic Bible to under-stand the basics of the stories.

Pope Francis addressed a delegation of the United Associ-ation of Humanistic Buddhism from Taiwan during their visit to the Vatican on an interreligious “educational pilgrimage.”
Pope Francis on March 16 stressed the importance of a culture of encounter, especially in a time marked by “a continued acceleration of changes affecting humanity and the planet.”
The Pope recognized the recent passing of Venerable Master Hsing Yun, the founding patriarch of Fo Guang Shan Monastery, a world-renowned figure in Humanistic Buddhism who was also a master of inter-religious hospitality.
The Pope went on to note that an educational pilgrimage to the sacred places of a religion, such as the one the delegation was undertaking, can also enrich one’s appreciation of the distin-ctiveness of its approach to the divine. He pointed to the master-pieces of religious art that surro-und visitors in the Vatican and throughout Rome, which reflect the conviction that, in Jesus Chri-st, God himself became a “pil-grim” in this world out of love for humanity.
Furthermore, he stressed the importance of religious believers creating oases of encounter, whi-ch contribute to an integral edu-cation of the human person, involving “head, hands, heart, and soul” and leading to the ex-perience of “the beauty and har-mony of what it is to be fully human.”

Less than 200,000 marriages were registered in South Korea in 2022, the lowest since 1970 when the country began recording demographic data, says the government.
The country recorded 191,690 marriages in 2022, down by 0.4 percent from 192,507 marriages in 2021, the Korea Herald reported on March 16 referring to data from the Korea Statistical Information Service.
The slump in marriages raises more concerns as the country reported in November 2021 that the population was 51.74 million, a drop of 0.2 percent or 91,000 persons from 2020.
In February, the government reported South Korea broke its own record of the lowest birth rates in the world. The total fertility rate, the average number of expected babies per South Korean woman during her reproductive age, dropped to 0.78 in 2022, down from 0.81 in 2021.
The capital city, Seoul, recorded the lowest rate with 0.59.
Lim Young-il, head of the Population Census Division at the agency pointed out that the population decline and the changes in South Koreans’ attitude towards marriage are the contributing factors to the low numbers.
“The number of marriages has decreased partly due to the constant decline of the population aged between 25 and 49,” Lim said adding that another reason was the “changing perception of marriage.”
The data showed that in 2022 the average age of first-time brides was 31.3 years up by 0.2 years and the age of grooms was 33.7 years up by 0.4 years in comparison to 2021.
Among the couples who married for the first time, 19.4% of partnerships were between an older female and a young male.
However, the marital partnerships between an older male and a young female had the major share of 64.4%, whereas 16.2% were of the same age.

Church leaders in Myanmar are up in arms against unregulated mining for rare earth elements — widely used in the production of high-tech devices like smartphones, computers, electric vehicles and solar cells — in the conflict-torn Southeast Asian nation’s Kachin state.
Mining for rare earth has increased sharply in northern mineral-rich Kachin state, bordering China’s Yunnan province, following the toppling of Myanmar’s civilian government by the military on Feb.1, 2021. “We are concerned about the effects of environmental degradation, the livelihoods of local communities and the wellbeing of animals due to the extraction of rare earth,” said Church leaders from Banmaw diocese in Kachin state, where unregulated rare earth mining is in full swing by Chinese firms and others. In a letter, signed by Bishop Raymond Sumlut Gam and four other diocesan leaders, including the vicar general and the chancellor, on March 4, they said rare earth minerals are a gift from God so “we have the responsibility to protect them.”

Hong Kong’s Catholic bishop is scheduled to visit Beijing next month at the invitation of the archbishop based in the Chinese capital to promote exchanges and interactions between Catholics in the two regions of China, an official statement said.
Bishop Stephen Chow Sau-yan of Hong Kong accepted the invitation from Archbishop Joseph Li Shan of Beijing and will spend five days in Beijing from April 17, Hong Kong Diocese said in a March 9 statement.
Chow accepted the invitation “in the spirit of brotherhood in the Lord,” the statement said.
Chow, a Jesuit, said his visit “underscores the mission of the Diocese of Hong Kong to be a bridge Church and promote exchanges and interactions between the two sides.”
Auxiliary Bishop Joseph Ha, vicar general Father Peter Choy, and the bishop’s assistant Wong Ka-Chun will accompany Chow during his visit to Beijing.
In addition to the meeting with Li, Chow and the team will also meet with other local bishops, clergy, and laity during this trip, said the statement published on the Hong Kong diocesan website, the Sunday Examiner.
The team will also visit the Beijing Major Seminary, the national seminary of the Catholic Church in China, and other relevant institutions concerning religious affairs.
Upon arriving in Beijing, the bishop will participate in the evening prayers and celebrate a thanksgiving mass at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Beijing.
The prelate’s travel will also include a visit to the tomb of Italian Jesuit missionary Father Matteo Ricci, who was recently declared venerable.
The team is also scheduled to visit organizations that promote cultural exchanges and hold gatherings with “Hong Kong friends working in Beijing,” the Sunday Examiner reported.
Critics of the deal say it is a “betrayal” of Catholics who remained loyal to the Vatican despite persecution.

Despite the criticism, Pope Francis said that he wants to continue “dialogue” with China despite the challenges.

Experts and Catholic groups in South Korea have called for more psychotherapy centres and counsellors and urged the Church to promote counselling as part of pastoral care amid a rise in suicide rates.
“[Pastoral] counselling should be added to sacramental pastoral care,” said Father Matthew Hong Sung-nam, director of the Catholic Psycho-Spiritual Counselling Centre of Seoul archdiocese.
He added that “the Church intervenes in people’s lives from birth to death and takes care of them. Similarly, pastoral centres of the Church should try to solve the problem.”
Pastoral counselling is a unique form of psychotherapy that uses spiritual resources as well as psychological understanding for healing and growth, according to the American Association of Pastoral Counselling. It is provided by certified pastoral counselors, who are not only mental health professionals but have also had in-depth religious and/or theological training.
“The demand for psychological support has increased remarkably”
According to a Covid-19 National Mental Health Survey conducted by the Ministry of Health and Welfare in August last year, the number of those admitting having suicidal thoughts had increased nearly threefold from 4.6 percent in 2019 to 12.7 percent in June 2022.

The Catholic Church in South Korea is the most trusted religious group on the peninsula, according to a recent survey.
Among those surveyed, 21.4 % of respondents revealed that they had more trust in Catholicism in comparison to other religions in the country.
The “2023 Korean Church Social Trust Survey” was conducted by G&Com Research on behalf of the Christian Ethics Practice Movement from Jan. 11 to 15 among 1,000 men and women over 19 years of age.
According to the survey, Protestantism came second with 16.5 % of respondents supporting it, while Buddhism occupied the third spot with 15.7 %.
However, in comparison to 2020 data, the overall reliability of Catholicism, Protestantism, and Buddhism declined.
The survey report was released on Feb. 16, at the 100th Anniversary Memorial Hall of Korean Churches in Seoul.
Catholics obtained the top spot with 29.4 % in terms of the volume or number of social support activities conducted. Protestants came in second with 20.6 % whereas Buddhists were third with 6.8%.
Catholicism also maintained the top spot in terms of the quality of social support services it provides to people.
In a 2020 survey, Protestantism occupied the top spot in this category.
Among the respondents, 26.7 percent felt that Catholic social support services offered good quality. Protestants came in second at 19.8 percent and Buddhists at 9.8 percent.

The Second Vatican Council’s document Lumen Gentium (light of the nations) clearly taught that the Church consists of all the baptized, not just the clergy.
The return to this conciliar concept surely is a powerful antidote to the recent discoveries of clerical domination and abuse in almost all spheres of ecclesial life.
In fact, the unprecedented opposition to this papal initiative even from within the Church — mostly from a powerful lobby of a vociferous clerical minority — is a clear sign that they are set to lose all the undue and excessive power and authority they had been used to wielding unjustly over the laity within the Church.
One characteristic of the current worldwide synodal process is to get all the baptized — the bishops, priests, religious and laity — involved in the ecclesial decision-making processes.
The unprecedented consultation of the baptized at grassroots levels on crucially important ecclesial issues was modeled for the harnessing of the sensus fidei fidelium (the sense of the faith of the believers) as it was done in the early Christian communities as we find in the New Testament, especially in the Acts of the Apostles.
This consultation — in the form of a questionnaire — thus, was uniquely novel in the sense that it was a process that began from the lowest rungs of the Church hierarchy — from the parish or ecclesial communities spread all over the world.
Those responses of the ecclesial grassroots were collected and sent to Rome by the bishops’ conferences in each country by August 2022.
It was this CSD that was sent to the seven zones of the world known as “continents”, namely, North America, South America, Asia, the Middle East, Europe, Africa and Oceania for further discussion and discernment.
The two-day Asian continental stage of the synodal process concluded on Feb. 26 at Samphran, Thailand with an ecclesial assembly consisting of delegates from all the episcopal conferences of Asia.

Indonesia’s minister of religious affairs has joined Church groups in condemning the disruption of Christian worship in Lampung province on Sumatra Island by citing a controversial government decree.
A local mob on Feb. 19 forcibly stopped congregational worship at the David Tabernacle Christian Church in Rajabasa saying the place of worship did not meet the criteria prescribed under the 2006 Joint Decree of the Minister of Religion and the Minister of Home Affairs.
A minimum of 90 people need to attend the services before establishing a place of worship under the decree. However, the Church reportedly has only 70 members.
The signatures of 60 members of other religious communities are also needed before setting up a church along with a recommendation from the local Religious Harmony Forum.
Minister Yaqut Cholil Qoumas said in an official statement on Feb. 21 that “there is no need for dissolution or banning” worship at the church.
“All parties are responsible for creating harmony” and any problems “must be resolved by deliberation,” Qoumas added.
According to advocacy groups, the decree only adds to the long list of obstacles being laid for minority communities and their faith practices in the world’s largest Muslim nation.

Indonesian Jesuit Father Bagus Laksana teaches theology and cultural studies at Sanata Dharma University in Yogyaka-rta. His research revolves around Christian-Muslim relations in the context of Javanese culture. In 2004 he published a book titled, Muslim and Catholic Pilgrimage Practices: Explorations through Java.
It presents Muslim and Catholic pilgrimages around Java island and shows an underlining rich ethnography and how Javanese culture is shaping those pilgrimages. His work suggests that Christian-Muslim relations should not be seen as an abstract dialogue, or even as a binary reality, but it must be seen in the backdrop of the particular social-cultural context, which shapes their encounter and interactions. Capuchin Bishop Paul Hinder, former Apostolic Vicar of Southern Arabia speaks about a thriving Church in the conflict-torn region, and also recalls the kidnapping of Indian Salesian Father Tom Uzhunnalil and the murder of four Missionaries of Charity nuns while he headed the vicariate
“What I see here is also a distinctive way of communing with God. With the sacred past, with the local holy figures, but also with others, including the non-Muslims here. So, it’s a very rich, very hybrid religiosity and it has some value for our world today.
“But here for Muslims and Catholics alike, these saintly figures are considered to a certain degree as ancestors, part of the community’s past that continues to be respected today.” Jesuit Father Bagus Laksana said.
“Then pilgrimage is also a devotion and a spiritual quest for peace and well-being. It’s not just a pious visit, but people are looking for something deeper, something that is keeping them through peace and well-being. Then the sacramentality of space, time, and things. This is very much there in the pilgrim tradition. Our encounter with God and our encounter with spirituality happen through space, time, and things. That is the specificity of the pilgrims’ tradition.”